Al Pacino has been sober for decades.
In a new interview with People, the 84-year-old shared that the reason behind his sobriety was his health. “I started to forget things at a very young age—they called them blackouts, so I got nervous.”
He started drinking and using substances after his meteoric rise to fame following 1972’s The Godfather. He tried Alcoholics Anonymous first, but it didn’t take, and so he turned to his friend Charlie Laughton, who acted as his sponsor.
“I went to AA for a while. It’s a great place, but it was not for me,” Pacino told the magazine, adding that Laughton “helped me.”
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Back in 2014, he spoke about his sobriety with The Hollywood Reporter, telling the outlet, “I was sort of blasted out of a cannon: five films, five Oscar nominations. I blew out with The Godfather and I didn’t know what was happening to me.
He continued, “I was drinking and doing and having fun and not having fun and dying and going crazy—I was doing all of those things—but I kept going. I didn’t know where I was… I know how explosive it was, but I was inebriated most of the time. I was trying to numb-up to get through it.”
Pacino looks back on his time in Hollywood in his new memoir, Sonny Boy, which is slated for release on Oct. 15.
